LCFG Annual Review 2017

On Friday 8th December 2017 instead of our normal monthly Deployers Meeting (which should have been on the Thursday the day before) we will be holding our traditional Annual Review session. This will start at 2pm and we aim to be finished by 5pm. This year it will be hosted by Information Services in Argyle House, Floor E, Rooms 14 & 15.

All users of LCFG are encouraged to attend this meeting to hear about what has been happening over the last year and what developments they can look forwards to in the next year. This is also an excellent opportunity to raise issues that are important to you, put forward ideas for future developments you would like to see and chat about all things LCFG!

As is traditional the meeting will be followed by a social event and we will go for dinner somewhere. Even if you cannot attend the meeting in the afternoon you are very welcome to join us for the social event in the evening.

If you have any topics you are particularly keen to have discussed then please edit this page and add them to the General Discussion section below with a brief summary.

Core project

Final report

Component changes

This has been a fairly quiet year in terms of component changes, here is a summary of the larger changes:

mariadb

New component from IS for managing MariaDB installations.

systemd

Various improvements...

autoreboot

A couple of important bugs resolved (bug#673 and bug#1011), also improved the robustness. Considering switching from at to systemd-run for issuing the shutdown command.

auth

Added support for creating user home directories when they do not exist. Like useradd this will use /etc/skel but it's also possible to specify an alternate skeleton directory.

yum

New purgecache method which can be used to completely clear the cache. This can save a lot of wasted disk space.

sudo

Rewritten into Perl and configs now generated using Template Toolkit. Other than the defaults all the LCFG managed config is now placed in /etc/sudoers.d/lcfg so that it is easier to find.

mock

Various updates to keep up with the ever-changing mock tool. Improved support for Fedora. SL6 chroots now need the use_nspawn option to be disabled. Can now correctly specify boolean values (bug#1015)

Platforms

SL6

Informatics now have approximately 20 SL6 machines remaining so testing for security updates is likely to end within a few months. It is likely that when EL 6.10 is released there will be the usual avalanche of security updates which will be backported to 6.8, that is probably the point at which all support for SL6 will be dropped.

EL7

This year has seen two minor releases - 7.3 and 7.4.

EL8

Still no sign of an alpha for EL8 and little in the way of helpful information on when this might appear. Surely we will see something in 2018?

Upcoming Development

General Discussion

systemd timers

It might be worthwhile switching from cron to systemd timers for the jobs managed via the cron component. In particular it might be sensible for components where we don't want to try to call a method if the same service is already running.

-- squinney - 2017-10-05